Stateside With Rosalea: Tariq Ali, 8 May 2003

Stateside with Rosalea

Tariq
Ali, 8 May 2003

By Rosalea
Barker

"We meet at a grim time." Such were
the opening words of Tariq Ali's talk on 'War, Empire and
Resistance' given in the heart of the military industrial
complex at UC Berkeley last week. (As someone in the
audience pointed out, the flag on stage was a gold-fringed
military one, and we were in an auditorium in the Stephen E.
Bechtel Engineering Centre.)

Tariq Ali's speaks on
'War, Empire and Resistance'

According to
a website at webcast.berkeley.edu, "Tariq Ali's life as a
writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker has been that of a
dissenter." Born in Pakistan in 1943, Ali left in the early
1960s to study at Oxford University in England and while
there he became a central figure in the anti-Vietnam war
movement. His latest book, 'Clash of Fundamentalisms',
investigates the post-September 11 "war on terror." He is on
the editorial committee of the New Left Review, and spoke at
this year's million-strong anti-war march in London.

The
invasion of Iraq is an event that will draw the dividing
lines of the 21st century even if it disappears from the
media, says Ali. On the subject of war, he referred to
Tacitus' report that Agricola, Roman consul of Britain, gave
as his reason for invading peaty, cold, bleak and seemingly
unimportant Ireland: "An unoccupied land gives ideas to
people in occupied lands."

Before 1914 wars were fought
between empires, he said, and the US had been largely
uninvolved in the wars in Europe because it was busy
building a South American and Pacific empire. Ali urged
people to read 'War is a Racket' by Major General Smedley
Butler, of the US Marine Corps. Smedley Butler retired in in
1931, ran as a Republican candidate for Senate in 1932, and
died in 1940.

(Large blocks of quoted material from that
book, printed up large and plastered on walls and windows,
made regular appearances during the lead-ups to the anti-war
marches here in the Bay Area. They were the only anti-war
signs that were systematically torn down.) The text is at
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

It
was WWI that brought the US empire onto the world stage - as
a counter-balance to the Russian Soviet empire - and, after
WWII, Japan and Germany were rebuilt as capitalist nations
to forestall battles with revolutionary nations. World
events since 1917, said Ali, can be seen as a continuum of
wars and revolutions, including the cold war. Two areas
where deals could not be done and revolutions not suppressed
were Asia and Central America, but by and large "the history
of the twentieth century is the history of European
empires."

The problem with the new US empire, he said, is
that it has no rival and even the Europeans are now scared
to resist it. No country in Europe backed the Vietnam War,
for example, and De Gaulle even pulled France out of NATO
over it. Under Reagan, "a counter-revolution started in
Nicaragua and ended in Moscow", and the creation of this
world-dominating US empire is being accomplished in
accordance with the precept that hegemony has to be achieved
by power.

But most of Tariq Ali's talk was given over to
the third topic - resistance. Who in the world can resist
the US? Of the major economic engines, Europe can't, Japan
isn't allowed to have a foreign policy, and China and Korea
are kept in a constant state of destabilisation.

According
to Ali, Ruth Wedgewood, one of Rumsfeld's advisers, has said
that the real problem on the Korean peninsular is that the
South Korean generals can't wait to get their hands on North
Korean nuclear weapons for their own use.

(If that is so,
it seems to me, then what drives US policy in that region is
not a fear of communism spreading, but of the emergence of a
powerful capitalist state capable of creating an empire to
counterbalance the US.)

Ali then turned to the emergence
of resistance within Iraq itself, which he sees as an
inevitable result of this new colonisation of the region.
The people of the Tigris and Euphrates have always resisted
colonisation by foreign empires - and by "always" we're
talking millennia. It was absurd for anyone to postulate
that the occupying forces would be met with flowers.

But
the chant on the streets in Cairo, when Baghdad fell so
easily, was "Where is our army?" and the inevitable
consequence of what seems to have been a deal between the
Iraqi regime and the US is that nationalist sentiment will
rise in all the Arab nations in the region who feel that
their rulers are US puppets.

Why was there no resistance
in Baghdad? A spontaneous resistance by the people was
probably out of the question since they didn't want to
protect Saddam Hussein, but why didn't the regime resist?
Just blowing up the bridges around the city would have held
the US up for a couple of weeks - and would have been the
end of Tony Blair in Britain, Ali surmised.

As an example
of spontaneous resistance, he spoke of how an army rating at
the Miraflores Palace in Venezuela was told by a general to
blow the trumpet to announce the choosing of a new
president, back when Chavez was ousted. "You put him in
power," said the rating, "so *you* play the trumpet." Half a
million people stormed the palace and within a few days
Chavez was back as the nation's leader.

"When there's
resistance from below, it really counts for something," said
Ali. Later he referred to the media coverage of the statue
toppling and the bombing of Al Jazeera's offices as an
example of how "the enemies one faces in trying to form an
opinion are much stronger now." Indymedia earned his praise
for its alternative coverage of the statue event.

Above
all, he said, the antiwar movement should not be too
discouraged. The size of the demonstrations at the beginning
of the year augur well for the future. In London,
schoolchildren poured into the streets spontaneously on the
day war started and in Scotland, where Blair was addressing
a sympathetic audience, the glass-walled conference centre
was quickly surrounded by 90,000 people shouting their
opposition.

The antiwar movement has to prepare for the
long haul as the empire will strengthen and consolidate for
the next twenty years, but it can also use the opportunity
of youth involvement, in particular. "Young people realise
that it's socially acceptable to be politically engaged," he
said, contrasting this decade to the 80s and 90s when it
wasn't so acceptable.

The US has bases in 121 out of the
189 countries that are in the UN, and it's not inconceivable
that a new Anti-Imperialist League might spring up, such as
the one that Mark Twain and others founded in response to
blatantly racist and undemocratic domestic policies that
resulted from the US occupation of the Philippines and the
events of the Boxer Rebellion.

He concluded his speech by
saying that now is the time to stop war, stop empire and
build resistance.

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